Re: a pre-beginner's question: what is the pros and cons of .net, compared to ++

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From: Gerry Hickman (gerry666uk_at_yahoo.co.uk)
Date: 01/15/05 

Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 01:36:17 +0000

Hi Lester,

> a pre-beginner's question:
> what is the pros and cons of .net, compared to C++

The first thing to understand, is that C++ is much more powerful than .NET

With C++ you can program any hardware/platform/os from the most
low-level device drivers right through to the most complex user
interface (UI) such as a professional grade drawing package, a video
editor, or a high performance game. There are also libraries available
that work cross-platform; windows/linux/solaris/mac.

.NET (other than MONO - another story) will only work on windows, is
slower, and can only be used for high-level programming. It's also
fallen into the old Java trap of having multiple vulnerable frameworks
that are incompatible with each other, meaning you can't just deploy
your project world-wide without dozens of issues related to "what
framework are your 500,000 users running?"

.NET is good for beginners, in the same way Visual Basic allowed you to
drag and drop "controls" onto "forms", you can also do this in .NET but
it's become a mess with WebForms being incompatiible with WinForms and
now they're dropping WinForms alltogether. Like any framework, the price
of being tied to the framework is often too high and can cause more
problems than it's worth - look into Longhorn and .NET 2.0 if you don't
believe me.

Even Microsoft's own technology is incompatible with .NET - for example,
see if you can write a video capture application, or a tool to
manipulate the LSA of a remote machine in .NET

If you live in the teddy-bear land of "Macromedia XP" then you'll LOVE
.NET, but if you live in the real world of Enterprise Computing, you'll
have to think twice... 

-- 
Gerry Hickman (London UK)